Life of Brian (1979): In-fighting among members of the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
PFJ Member: Brought peace?
Reg: Oh, peace? SHUT UP!
COSMOS Magazine 2014
A senseless fightCombatants on both sides of the food wars are fighting for the same ends, writes Elizabeth Finkel.
...The battle doesn’t make much sense. On either side of the line you find combatants in fierce agreement about the key issues – the right of all people to affordable nutritious food, protection of the environment and giving poor farmers a viable livelihood. Yet the battle rages with ever-greater heat. Last December, the Hawaiian island of Kauai outlawed the cultivation of new GM crops, despite the technology having saved its papaya industry from the Papaya Ringspot virus. (Papaya farmers will still be allowed to use the resistant GM variety but no new GM crops are to be planted). Those who led the push for the ban saw themselves as champions of the political left and of the environment. But so do many plant scientists.
“It hurts…these are my people, they’re lefties, I’m with them on almost everything,” Michael Shintaku, a plant pathologist at the University of Hawaii told New York Times reporter Amy Harmon. For Robert Zeigler, the Director General of IRRI, Shintaku’s sentiment was all too familiar. Zeigler has worked with poor farmers in Africa and Asia for most of his life, yet IRRI’s experimental rice fields were attacked by “leftists”. “Shintaku’s response resonated very deeply,” he said.
As we face the challenge of feeding a planet poised to add the population of two more Chinas by mid-century, this warfare does no one any good.
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